How About Mobile Game Representation in Super Smash Bros?
When it comes to the debate of what games are and are not worthy of being in Super Smash Bros, I find that the conversation is often not very lucrative. Frankly, the idea of deciding whether a character from a particular game or game series is “worthy” of being in Smash is pretty arbitrary and often used to justify why certain characters can’t be in Smash for one reason or another. Take Geno as an example.
A small selection of gamers love Geno as a character and would love to see him one day break the Mii Costume curse and advance to a full fighter, and share this admiration and desire to see the character freely. But a lot of times, they may encounter other fans who remark that Geno isn’t “relevant” enough, or that he’s from an old game or came from only one game and therefore isn’t notable enough compared to characters like Mario, Sonic, etc, who frequently make appearances in long-running franchises.
While this is a fair enough assessment, people often treat it as an end-all-be-all, and it often devolves from a conversation of what characters can and cannot be in Smash to what characters people think “should” and “should not” be, which is of course completely different. And it’s often wrong as well since characters like Duck Hunt have managed to make it into Smash despite only appearing in one game and not even as the “main character”.
In my opinion, this is not only unfair to the people who legitimately love these characters and simply want to see them in action, but also invalidates the idea that Smash is more than just a fighting game but a celebration of gaming as a whole. There’s no other licensed game that exists where you’d be able to have characters like Minecraft Steve, Sora, Donkey Kong, Sonic, or Solid Snake all standing next to each other and fighting, and that’s the magic of it.
The only limit is that the character has to be from a video game, and that already creates a nigh-limitless selection to choose from, so trying to narrow down the choices to games or franchises that are “worthy” enough to be possible feels rather odd to me. With that in mind, an interesting thing to contextualize this conversation around is whether or not mobile games have a place. In other words, would a character from a mobile game joining the Super Smash Bros roster be possible?
I’ve seen the issue of whether people who play mobile games are “real” gamers brought up so many times that I’ve grown weary of even engaging with the topic. Of course, the only requirement for being considered a “gamer” is playing games, so even someone who only plays Candy Crush or Angry Birds could be considered a gamer.
I think the main reason this issue even exists is that most gamers could fall into the group of people who either play on PC or consoles, and these mediums could be considered more advanced than something like Angry Birds and make up a larger part of the gaming industry.
This of course doesn’t really matter since they’re still gamers, and mobile games are played by just as many millions of people as franchises like Pokemon, Mario, Call of Duty, Sonic, etc., but my point is that this is probably the reason most people will likely cite.
Mobile games simply don’t have as much of an impact on the industry, and as a result, representing them in Smash Bros would be met with awkward glances. But is impact really what matters here? If you look at the hard facts, mobile games made about 50% of total gaming revenue in 2020, and its likely percentage has only increased with the now wider scope of such games as Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go, and Raid: Shadow Legends, just to name a few, and for that to even happen, millions of people will need to have downloaded and played them.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the impact that matters here, but rather the common perceptions surrounding mobile games. This obviously doesn’t apply to all of them, but mobile games often suffer from a “pay-to-win” sort of formula, where investing real money into a game benefits players and grants advantage over those who simply want to enjoy the game casually. There’s no way to dance around or sugarcoat this.
Microtransactions suck in the eyes of a lot of people (One of our 7 Deadly Sins in Game Design), and on top of that, mobile games are often simply seen as lacking in the same level of quality, polish, and variety that console or PC games possess. While that could be chalked up to a bit of a superiority complex, in the sense of seeing PC or consoles as “better” than mobile games, it would still make the addition of a mobile game representative in Smash Bros feel out of place.
However, I’m of the opinion that this may not be the case all the time. The gaming community has such a wide-reaching influence that characters from mobile games are likely to be recognizable. Characters from games like Genshin Impact, Angry Birds, or Cookie Run almost immediately come to mind, and since Nintendo is a Japanese company, taking in either Nintendo or Japanese mobile games would expand that list even further.
Realistically speaking, adding in a character from Dragalia Lost would actually make sense from a purely business perspective and allow Nintendo to both acknowledge and find a reason to expand on their mobile gaming scene.
But putting the business or recognizability aspects aside, the true intention of a game like Super Smash Bros is, as I’ve explained, to celebrate gaming as a whole. We can argue about the necessity or worthiness of a mobile gaming representative and how people would react to it all day, but the impact of the mobile gaming industry can’t be ignored forever as it only continues to expand.
Whether or not people think a mobile character “belongs” in Smash ultimately may not matter if the upward trend of innovation in mobile gaming only continues. While I do not see it happening anytime soon, I believe that sooner or later characters who represent mobile gaming as a whole will make their debut in whatever the next Super Smash Bros game ends up being. They’ll likely shake things up, but they’ll represent a side of the gaming industry that’s been seen in a bad light for too long. This will ultimately help people see it as something worthy of being taken just as seriously as characters born on console or PC.
Thank you for stopping by Nintendo Link! What do you think of this proposal? Do you think some mobile gaming characters should be in future installments of Super Smash Bros? Let us know what you think in the comments!
